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incarnation,
In 451 a General Council at Chalcedon, not far from Constantinople, affirmed that Jesus Christ was “complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, . . . in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division or without separation, . . . coming together to form one person.”
Some Christians in Egypt and Syria and India do not.
Christology
S. Whale once told the undergraduates at Cambridge University,
A living Church is a
worshiping, singing Church; not a school of people holding all the correct doctrines.”
Second-and third-century believers rejected Ebionism and Gnosticism because they were so clearly distortions of this truth.
The Alexandrians emphasized strongly the divine nature and the Antiochians the human. One began in heaven and moved to earth; the other commenced on earth and looked to heaven.
MAJOR HERESIES ABOUT CHRIST
Between 350 and 450 “heresies” arose,
the Alexandrian stress on the deity of Christ, but only a body represented Christ’s human nature.
And if the Word displaced the rational soul of human nature, with its powers of choice and sin, how can man be fully redeemed?
Nestorius, a famous preacher at Antioch before the emperor, in 428,
In rejecting the phrase, Nestorius made it appear that he held that Christ joined two persons.
wills rather than that of an essential “union.” Although he never divided Christ into “two sons,” Son of God and son of Mary, he refused to attribute to the divine nature the human acts and sufferings of the man Jesus.
He insisted that calling Mary “Mother of God” was tantamount to declaring that the divine nature could be born of a woman, or that God could be three days old.
The whole affair was disgustingly riddled with power politics.
To this day it remains unclear to what extent Nestorius’ teachings were actually heretical and to what extent he suffered as a victim of misunderstanding and misrepresentations.
Nestorius insisted that he did not oppose the use of “God-bearer” because he denied the Godhead of Christ but to emphasize that Jesus was born as a genuine human being with body and soul. His concerns were not unfounded.
the third “heresy” arose. Eutyches,
Just “as a drop of honey, which falls into the sea, dissolves in it,” so the human nature in Christ is lost in the divine.
Flavian condemned him as a heretic.
Christ in the Major Church Councils Statement Council Christ is fully divine Council of Nicaea 325 Christ is fully human Council of Constantinople 381 Christ is a unified person Council of Ephesus 431 Christ is human and divine in one person Council of Chalcedon 451
monophysite doctrine led to the Coptic Church, the largest Christian body in Egypt today, with a related church in Ethiopia, and the so-called Jacobite Church of Syria, which has most of its adherents in South India.
At the human level the problem resists explanation.
In effect, it erected a fence and said, “Within this lies the mystery of the God-man.”
“He who, by the necessity of his position, is required to speak the highest things, is compelled by the same necessity to exemplify the highest.”
With Gregory, monasticism for the first time ascended the papal throne.
In his doctrine of man Gregory stressed that Adam’s fall affected all his descendants, weakening but not destroying their freedom of will. Thus, once man has been moved by grace, he may cooperate with it and win merit for himself by his good works, which are the joint product of divine grace and human will.
In baptism, God grants forgiving grace freely without any merit on man’s part, but for sins committed after baptism man must make
atonement by penance, which is simply a form of punishment inflicted by the man h...
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Penance involves repentance, which must be sincere and of the heart, and also confession and meritorious works.
How could the kingdom that Jesus said was “not of the world” become so much a part of worldly power? The answer lies in the persistence of an idea and the rise of a powerful kingdom.
behind the pope’s action lay his need for a powerful protector.
Charlemagne, Charles the Great. When Charles succeeded his father in 768 his mind was set on three goals—military power to crush his enemies, religious power to direct his people’s souls, and intellectual power to instruct both souls and minds. Charlemagne’s success in these areas made Europe—the new political order—nominally Christian, for better or for worse, for a thousand years.
Theoretically church and state were in harmonious interplay, each aiming to secure the good of mankind.
fact, however, the pope and emperor were contestants. The ever-present question was, should the church rule the state, or the state control the church?
